Complete Works

again, nearly black, resembling a post stuck upright against the slaty background of solid cloud.  Since first noticed she had not gained on us a foot.
    “She will never catch the Tremolino ,” I said exultingly.
    Dominic did not look at me.  He remarked absently, but justly, that the heavy weather was in our pursuer’s favour.  She was three times our size.  What we had to do was to keep our distance till dark, which we could manage easily, and then haul off to seaward and consider the situation.  But his thoughts seemed to stumble in the darkness of some not-solved enigma, and soon he fell silent.  We ran steadily, wing-and-wing.  Cape San Sebastian nearly ahead seemed to recede from us in the squalls of rain, and come out again to meet our rush, every time more distinct between the showers.
    For my part I was by no means certain that this gabelou (as our men alluded to her opprobriously) was after us at all.  There were nautical difficulties in such a view which made me express the sanguine opinion that she was in all innocence simply changing her station.  At this Dominic condescended to turn his head.
    “I tell you she is in chase,” he affirmed moodily, after one short glance astern.
    I never doubted his opinion.  But with all the ardour of a neophyte and the pride of an apt learner I was at that time a great nautical casuist.
    “What I can’t understand,” I insisted subtly, “is how on earth, with this wind, she has managed to be just where she was when we first made her out.  It is clear that she could not, and did not, gain twelve miles on us during the night.  And there are other impossibilities. . . .”
    Dominic had been sitting motionless, like an inanimate black cone posed on the stern deck, near the rudder-head, with a small tassel fluttering on its sharp point, and for a time he preserved the immobility of his meditation.  Then, bending over with a short laugh, he gave my ear the bitter fruit of it.  He understood everything now perfectly.  She was where we had seen her first, not because she had caught us up, but because we had passed her during the night while she was already waiting for us, hove-to, most likely, on our very track.
    “Do you understand — already?” Dominic muttered in a fierce undertone.  “Already!  You know we left a good eight hours before we were expected to leave, otherwise she would have been in time to lie in wait for us on the other side of the Cape, and” — he snapped his teeth like a wolf close to my face — ”and she would have had us like — that.”
    I saw it all plainly enough now.  They had eyes in their heads and all their wits about them in that craft.  We had passed them in the dark as they jogged on easily towards their ambush with the idea that we were yet far behind.  At daylight, however, sighting a balancelle ahead under a press of canvas, they had made sail in chase.  But if that was so, then —
    Dominic seized my arm.
    “Yes, yes!  She came out on an information — do you see, it? — on information. . . . We have been sold — betrayed.  Why?  How?  What for?  We always paid them all so well on shore. . . . No!  But it is my head that is going to burst.”
    He seemed to choke, tugged at the throat button of the cloak, jumped up open-mouthed as if to hurl curses and denunciation, but instantly mastered himself, and, wrapping up the cloak closer about him, sat down on the deck again as quiet as ever.
    “Yes, it must be the work of some scoundrel ashore,” I observed.
    He pulled the edge of the hood well forward over his brow before he muttered:
    “A scoundrel. . . . Yes. . . . It’s evident.”
    “Well,” I said, “they can’t get us, that’s clear.”
    “No,” he assented quietly, “they cannot.”
    We shaved the Cape very close to avoid an adverse current.  On the other side, by the effect of the land, the wind failed us so completely for a moment that the Tremolino’s two great lofty sails hung idle to the masts in the thundering uproar of the seas breaking upon the shore we had left behind.  And when the returning gust filled them again, we saw with amazement half of the new mainsail, which we thought fit to drive the boat under before giving way, absolutely fly out of the bolt-ropes.  We lowered the yard at once, and saved it all, but it was no longer a sail; it was only a heap of soaked strips of canvas cumbering the deck and weighting the craft.  Dominic gave the order to throw the